Austro-Hungary, The Kingdom
of Italy, the “restored” Empire of Japan, the British Raj as an
Empire over India. A period that start

ed with two of the bloodiest
conflicts in European History

to that time: the Crimean War from
1856-1858,

and the American Civil War of 1861-1856.

But why did this remarkable quarter
century fail to be labelled as what it was?

At the time, it was
understood as a revolution,

or series of revellions and revolutions.

The winners did not want to win a revolution,

but to defeat
rebellion,

the losers wanted to have revolution mean a step towards
either a liberal or socialist future,

based on an uprising of the
people.

Thus, they saw this “revolution from above”

as the spirit
of reaction,

and therefore a step backwards.

The losers fell into two
camps:

the localized, often landed, anti-capitalist forces,

many of
them rallying around local aristocracies,

and the Romanticist
liberalizng forces,

which included the communist movements of the
time,

but also the liberalizing and direct democratic forces.

Thus the idea of a global moment of
revolution

did not fit into any of the three story lines that major
bodies of opinion wanted to tell.

For the adherents of the old French
and American Revolutions,

the declaration of a German charter and
legislature in 1848 should have been “the revolution itself.”

From this should have followed elections,

and an order based on the
consent of the governed.

For the decentralized agrarian forces,

the
overthrow of the last Mughal Emperor,

the creation of large nation
states,

and the defeat of the American confederate cause,

represented
a usurpation of ancient rites and customs by an encroaching,

and
illegitimate state.

They did not want to admit that their might be
revolution,

which did not move in their “natural” and
“inevitable” direction,

Defeat meant that there had been
“revolution from above.”

From the point of view of the winners,

the constant violence around economic populism,

that had caught fire
repeatedly for three quarters of a century

needed to be laid to rest,

and following Machiavelli's dictum, declared that all was old again.

But when examined, this turned out to
not be the case.

Take, for example, the “Meiji Restoration,”

in
Japan.

It claimed to reassert the rule of the emperor.

However,
examining Japanese history,

it is arguable that the emperor had ever
had personal command.

In the early Japanese dynasties,

the emperor
was essential the chief priest of Shinto,

and the ceremonial demands
were so strenuous,

that it took retirement from the throne to
actually have time to rule.

For the previous 250 years,

there had
been a continuous line of military rulers,

the Shoguns, all in a
single family.

The rule by the bakufu had been in existence since
roughly 1200 AD,

with only two brief interuptions.

Before that the
imperial family had been often only nominally in charge

since the
Taika Reform starting in 645.

That is, 650 years of Shogunate,

and
before that the Emperor

had not been the real power

for most of the
previous 500 years.

What conservatism?

What continuity?

This pattern
is true in France as well,

Louis Napoleon won an election,

and then
asserted rule in the name of a deposed usurper.

The House of Bourbon
would never sit on the throne again.

What continuity?

The Bakufu, gone,

the Mughal empire,
gone, t

he British East India Company, gone,

the Restored Monarchy of
France, gone.

The United States was under the control of a political
party that had not existed until 1854.

To deny the political
dimension of what happened in this period,

is to ignore the obvious
facts.

Thus in Marxist-Leninist thought the
concept of a Boursgeois revolution

based on objective factors of work
was invented,

which had various sub-types based on the ability

of the
bourgeois core to recruit other oppressed groups into the revolution,

including broad “democratic” revolutions. At leas this viewpoint
allows for revolutionary movements and moments which do not adhere to
a particular progressive narrative.

However as soon as it is
established that there can be boursgeois revolutions,

the Lenninist
argues that the proletariat is the only truly revolutionary class,

or
at least it is “the most” revolutionary class,

as the Great
Soviet Encyclopedia outlined in its 1979 article.

The problem with this theory in
response to the 1848-1873 period,

is that it saw the boursegeois
revolution as defeated in 1848,

and its standard was the “vestiges
of the medieval.”

Similar narratives are found in sociology.

In
2012, Neil Davidson published a detailed study

“How Revolutionary
Were the Bourgeois Revolutions?”

By his own admission, he was
strongly influenced by Isaac Deutscher,

and involved in a defense of
the idea that bourgeois revolutions are primarily social,

directed at
a specific crisis,

and involved in overthrowing the feudal order.

He
writes:

“The bourgeois revolutions are bourgeois not because they
are led by the bourgeoisie,

but because they make possible the
development

of bourgeois society on the basis of the capitalist mode
of production.

In other words,
it is the outcome which is important,
not the process or the personnel.”

The classical Marxist position has the
bourgeois pushed by lower classes,

and not,

in themselves,

interested
in revolution,

and classifies the result,

as Deutscher would state in
his writings,

as the establishment of the capitalist mode of
production,

and if not, then there would be a “passive revolution”
from above.

This description too has deep empirical problems.

Bismark, the realpolitick maker of the German Revolution,

was hardly
a passive actor:

he fought several wars,

engaged in internal
political struggle,

and with his political allies,

such as Moltke,

remade the Prussian military instrument.

It has great difficulty explaining the
overthrow of a private capitalist enterprise,

the British East India
Company,

with the Raj.

There are,

of course,

ample words expended on
these explanations,

but the core problem is that they fail to relate,

except by enumeration of ever longer lists of “tasks.”

Among the winning side,

it was better
to place what happened in the context of what would later be termed,

“The Whig Narrative of History,”

or just “Whig History.”

The
term itself requites history to decade.

The Whig party evolved in the 1800's
in England,

arguing that enlightened self-interest in

stakeholding
aristocrats was an essential counterweight to royal prerogative.

It
was grounded in ideas of John Locke,

and looked at the “Glorious
Revolution” of 1688

as the model of a revolution,

short, sharp,
decisive, virtually bloodless,

and with minimal disruption to
business.

We should take the term with some due distance,

it was
meant perjoratively,

as the writer who codified it,Hergert
Butterfield,

was critiquing what he called “a psychology of
historians.”

The reason for digging into these
details so quickly is to prove a point:

history is told not on
agreement,

but on the fulcrum of disagreement.

Winners and losers
were willing to argue

over short sharp encounters such as 1848,

being
the largest revolution that the winners would admit to being,

and the
largest the losers would admit to losing.

Instead the moment is
called “the industrial revolution,”

and chalked up to a
technological change, with a “social revolution,”

rather that
what the people

at the time understood as a violent re-arrangement of
the political order.

When Bismarck gave his short oration that is now
known

to history as his “Blood and Iron” speech,

he closes with
the following:

Germany
does not look to Prussia's liberalism, but to its power. Bavaria,
Wurttemberg, and Baden would like to turn to liberalism, but they
shall not assume Prussia's role. Prussia must collect its forces for
the favorable occasion, which has several times been neglected;
Prussia's borders are not favorable to a healthy national life. Not
by speeches and decisions of majorities will the greatest problems of
the time be decided - that was the mistake of 1848-49 - but by iron
and blood.

This is not a passive statement,

nor is
it counter-revolutionary,

against some new order from which Prussia
had fallen,

but of a direct assertion of new principles.

They just
are not the principles which either the whig view of history,

or the
marxist view of history would like to ascribe.

To understand the
period,

is to understand that is a full blooded revolution

against
encumbering ties and established powers,

and it is an integrated
replacement for the previous period's dominant ideologies.